W.H. Auden

Aleksandar Hemon, the 48-year-old Bosnian refugee who has become one of this city's literary rock stars, can amuse and he can devastate. That he does both in his second language, wielded with precision and elegance, has earned him comparisons to Nabokov and Joseph Conrad. Hemon's gifts are on ample display in his first nonfiction work, "The Book of My Lives." Not a conventional memoir, the book is a collection of short pieces, most previously published and arranged here in rough chronological order. Sometimes sketchy, characteristically idiosyncratic and sardonic, nearly always engaging, they constitute an impressionistic overview of Hemon's lives in both his...

Related "W.H. Auden" Articles

Aleksandar Hemon, the 48-year-old Bosnian refugee who has become one of this city's literary rock stars, can amuse and he can devastate. That he does both in his second language, wielded with precision and elegance, has earned him comparisons to Nabokov...

For Caroline Kennedy's 50th birthday, several of her close friends presented her with poems to mark the occasion. They understood the significance of poetry in her life, how she learned to understand it by looking through volumes, deciphering marks in...

"A poet," Louis Simpson once wrote, "should wish for enough unhappiness to keep him writing."Simpson may not have wished for trouble, but he kept writing for 60 years — spare, powerful poems about war, infidelity, suburban alienation...

Adrienne Rich, a pioneering feminist poet and essayist who challenged what she considered to be the myths of the American dream and subsequently received high literary honors, died Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz. She was 82.
The cause was...

In 1984, when he was 51, novelist Reynolds Price learned that a pencil-shaped tumor, about 10 inches long and malignant, had invaded his spine. Several surgeries and dozens of radiation treatments followed, leaving him a paraplegic racked with pain and...